A letter to the Reading Chronicle which was published on 18th November 1969.

Mr Hannis in last Friday’s “Chronicle” asserts that my figures on the GCE performance of school leavers are wrong, taking as evidence the oft-quoted Pedley book on comprehensive schools and a recent speech by Lord Butler.  I cannot speak for Lord Butler, but unlike Mr Hannis I had before writing looked up the figures in the Department of Education and Science’s official Statistics of Education.

For 1967 (the latest available, 1966 figures are similar) tables 14 and 16 give five or more O-levels or CSE grade 1 as follows: for comprehensive  schools 10,320 out of 76,750 leavers, or 13.5 per cent, and for all other maintained schools 86,500 out of 474,620 leavers or 18.2 per cent.  Table 18 gives two or more A-levels as follows: for comprehensive schools 5,110 or 6.7 per cent and for all other maintained schools 45,890 or 9.7 per cent.  In his book (p. 95) Pedley in fact acknowledges the poor academic performance of comprehensive schools so far and attributes this to the substantial number of newly-formed comprehensive schools.  There is clearly something in this, but I have quoted the figures to show that the case for comprehensive schools is not, to say the least, made out and that there are significant pointers against the effectiveness of comprehensive education, particularly from abroad.

Thus in the case of the USA, if Mr Clifton (last Friday) would be satisfied with an academic performance which out of 11 Western countries placed his country bottom by a wide margin (T Husen, International Study of Achievement in Mathematics 1967) and which produced in California only a few teachers apparently able to deal with simple arithmetic (D A Pidgeon, Educational Research 1959), I would not be.  In some senses formal academic education in the USA only begins at 18, and in recognition of its comparative failure, some authorities, e.g. Dr Koerner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) are actively considering forms of State-maintained selective schooling.

The USA owes its prodigious wealth, not to its formal educational system (it is in fact heavily dependent on the products of European selectively educated talent) but to its great natural resources and to the spirit of enterprise and hard work of its people, neither of which latter attributes is exactly stressed by the comprehensive principle.  In fact, in my experience, the spectacle of comprehensively and permissively educated American youth is probably the principal factor in inducing British scientists and engineers and their families to return to this country.

In some parts of the country, where for example there are small numbers of children, comprehensive schools, provided they adhere to scholastic discipline, will probably make the best use of limited educational resources.  What the proponents of comprehensive education, aided and abetted by a dictatorial Labour government, will not admit is that academic standards are crucial, and that our selective system has set levels which are outstandingly good by any standards.

Councillor Towner’s remark implying that examinations at 11 to predict the suitability of a child for different forms of education are unreliable is quite untrue.  Thus recent large-scale investigations (by e.g. the National Foundation for Education Research) showed an error of about 5 per cent in placing candidates and the errors were confined to borderline cases which could be easily remedied by transfer.  In fact many comprehensive schools administer just such tests on admission, for streaming purposes; others however wait a year or two before streaming.